Beyond School

Speech Outline

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story.

Learning Technologies 2009 Keynote, Part 1: Click image to view.

The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks
(watch before Speech Part 2. Slide to 5.15 for the kicker)

Learning Technologies Keynote Part 2 (click image to view)

~

Prologue: On Time and Other Thieves¹

Anybody as oblivious to the passage of time and calendar pages as I am knows it can be a source of both bliss and embarrassment: bliss because the hours and days are so damned interesting you don’t have time to notice them; embarrassment because some of those hours and days demand your notice — or else there’s hell to pay.

Common examples: birthdays, anniversaries, blasted holidays.²

Less common: the keynote speech I gave to the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference in Mooloolaba, Australia, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, recently — d’oh! — not so recently: last November. It’s time to share it, reflect on it, and say thanks. Where does the time go?

~

The Story of the Speech: A Farce

Exposition: Seth Godin as Textbook

I’ve given smaller presentations before at various schools, at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok a few years ago, and so forth, but they were always in-house. But this one was by special invitation and, cooler still, for the keynote of the final day. I’ve never given a keynote before, and wanted to rise to the occasion with my best creative effort.

But I had other, more important reasons for wanting to do well: I wanted to use the speech to teach my students. The invitation came in September, at the very time that I had assigned my Western Civ and Chinese history students to give “creative speeches” of their own. As you’ll see if you watch the speech, I had tossed out the ’schooly’ approach to oral presentations — you know, the Death by Droning Powerpoint  — and replaced it with a different “textbook” for speeches.

That “different textbook” was online. It was TED Talks. More specifically, Seth Godin’s talk “On Standing Out.” Here it is:

I showed this Talk to all my classes in the first week of school and, in a nutshell, told them that the closer they got to Godin’s delivery and slide creativity, the closer they got to an “A.” It resulted in the best time I’d had watching student presentations in my entire decade of teaching. Not all the students rose to the challenge, mind you. But those that did proved the value of the attempt in spades.

Good for the Gander

So I figured I’d be a good egg and put my money (and reputation) where my mouth was for my students: I’d give my own “Godinesque” presentation³ in Australia and, knowing it was to be filmed and put online, share the link so they could learn, along with me, whether my TED/Godin evangelism had real-world merit, or was just the latest example of teacher BS. They’d get to see me walk the tightrope without a net, and judge for themselves.

Damned Clocks, Blasted Calendars

There was a small problem. I was already drowning in the waves familiar to all teachers in their first year at a new school — above all,  creating curriculum and syllabi from virtual scratch (I didn’t like the textbooks). I didn’t have a lot of mental space for crafting a speech on something as far afield from that teacher-head terrain as the conference’s theme: “The Power of You.” My head was in the Power of History.

I burnt the candle one night brainstorming an outline for the thing, wrestling the whole time with my confusion over that most important question for any communicator: Who, exactly, is the audience? I couldn’t tell if it was teachers, administrators, corporate types; if they were already techie born-agains, or phobic techie infidels. I muddled on anyway, and saved the file for later.

The next time I looked at the calendar it was the Friday a week before the conference. I didn’t have a single slide.

The Pleasures of Masochism

My long-suffering wife of a workaholic listened to another apology that I had to work through another weekend, and watched me slink off into my office/doghouse. I fired up the by-now old outline I’d banged out, looked at it, and promptly deleted that four hours of late-night work. My head was in the Roman Republic back then, and now it was in the Late Medieval period. I had other things to say now. Our classroom had long since moved on from the student presentations to discussions of the “key concept” of “civilization” and its textbooky “five characteristics,” and I wanted to prove to my 15-year-old charges that this bit of schooly knowledge could be put to good real-world use, done critically and creatively. Plus, our class time-travels, since I’d made that outline, had covered an additional 1,500 years of memorizing one damn fact and name after another for ninth-grade tests and essays, and I wanted to demonstrate ditto for those schooly testable items — wanted to show them that knowing history can be golden when arguing in public for a real cause.

The Madness of Blog-Mining and Flickr-Fishing

Then something beautiful happened. Read the rest of this entry »

1. “Time and other thieves” lifted from lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues,” from the (near-perfect) Hejira album [↩]
2. David, one of my all-time favorite students — whose work you’ll see featured in the speech — told me last week he’d found the perfect coffee mug for me from the Onion website. The cup reads, “I hate whatever today is.” [↩]
3. I actually use that phrase in class [↩]

Just a quick share: I’m giving my Chinese history / China studies students this “starter kit” of RSS feeds about contemporary China from Asian and Western sources to start them on their self-directed explorations (and small group blog reports) about whatever they want to learn.

It’s the cream of my own Google Reader “China” folder, which I created and populated over winter break. If anybody has more feeds to suggest, please add them in comments. Otherwise, I share them to spare any other China studies folks out there the necessity of re-inventing the wheel. Here they are, from our class Ning:

Blogs in Asia (China, Hong Kong, etc) About China:

1. China Digital Times:

It’s my main source of up-to-the-minute news about all things China. Like CNN.com, it covers China-oriented news on all subjects: politics, culture, society, arts, human rights, economics, law, diplomacy and foreign relations, books, law, science and technology, the whole nine yards.

The best thing about it: it’s what we call a “curator” blog. Its writers scan all the important presses — magazines, newspapers, academic and political journals, on and on, for significant writings on China. Then they write a brief intro of the article, give you an excerpt, and a link to the whole article elsewhere on the web. So they do the searching for you, and consolidate the best content across the web each day in one place.

2. Danwei: Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

3. ChinaGeeks

4. ChinaSMACK

5. The People’s Daily

6. The People’s Daily: Opinions and Editorials

US Sites About China: The Capitalist/Liberal-Democratic View

These sites are from the more mainstream US media outlets. They, too, will have their biases, so read them with equal care. They’re often written by Westerners with little deep knowledge of China and its history, so respect yourself and your own knowledge about China as that knowledge grows. You should be able, increasingly, to find blind spots in these Western views.

7. The Wall Street Journal: China RealTime Report Blog

8. The New Yorker Magazine: Letters from China

217 years ago last week, Louis XVI’s head rolled from a Paris guillotine. One of my students emailed me to tell me that, because we’d discussed that event on the very day of its anniversary. A few years after that bloody blade gave death to feudalism and birth to modernity, the French Revolution became so radical it tried to uproot the Christian church in France and replace it with what it considered a better alternative. This reminds me, sidewise, of a story I heard years back, and want to embellish in the telling. I’ve been using this space too much lately to merely blog, and tonight I feel like writing. It’s hard to get back into that swing, but harder not to swing in it.

Pride and Prejudice, Revisited

He was lower-middle class economically, above most of the “upper” class culturally, and long past much belief in, or need for, most things church-related.

But he was engaged now, and meeting his future family-in-law for the first time. They were opposite him in almost every way, but in two ways, above all, that made him nervous: they were unimaginably wealthy, and they were regular church-goers.

During their first meeting the day before, through several subtle signs — their exchange of glances when he told them he’d never golfed, and when he had to ask how to mount that horse at their estate; his future mother-in-law’s quick scold of her husband’s questions about his (non-existent) investment portfolio, followed by her pained change of subject — he had gathered that he had little hope of overcoming their disappointment in his lack of silver-spooned pedigree.

(Truth be told, he wished his girl lacked it too, so that they could leave this Jane Austen re-run, dispense with the class difference dramas, rely on their own talents and hard work for any future success, and just live and love more simply — as, when they were on neutral turf, they did. Like that day at the river the week before, when she was just her, and he was more than enough for her. She’d dropped her gold ring and watch, heirlooms both, off the rocks and into the river, and given them up for lost beneath the rapids. He told her to keep the faith, found a long branch in the forest, and told her to hold it straight down from the rock to the river-bottom. He dove in, followed the branch down, and felt his way along the silt in the dark, then rose fist-first from the depths, exultant and beaming, jewels in hand and glowing gold in the sun.

They’d told that story to her family later that day, but none of them seemed to think it mattered. He knew it didn’t either, but also knew it very much did.)

His friends didn’t believe him, but he really did regret that she came from wealth.

But if the wealth gap was spilt milk, he still had a fighting chance, he knew, to overcome that other difference. He told himself he would be a good sport about his in-laws’ faith, and go to their Sunday morning service with the open mind he prided himself on, and with his own version of faith: “good faith.” He would withhold judgment, and give their church the benefit of the doubt.

At the same time, he was honest enough with himself to recognize that he fully expected the service to be a pained, “smile until your lips bleed” affair.

Sunday

The colonial red-brick church was exclusive, for Virginia’s bluest bloods. Several of America’s Founding Fathers, who had lived in the neighborhood over two centuries earlier, had worshiped in these very pews. The Sunday morning parking lot was filled with the Saabs of the Old Money families, the Lexuses and Mercedes of the less secure and more self-conscious nouveau riche. His clothes and shoes were a couple of notches below the apparent Sunday standard here. He smiled through the doorway handshakes, the class inspections posing as introductions; then he smiled down the aisle and into the pew. His mother-in-law’s perfume seemed a thing made in heaven. He never knew perfume could so intoxicate, and could only imagine how dear the price tag.

To the podium came the pastor, a powerfully-built but kind-faced old man. He liked the old man instantly — naturally mild and at ease, much the mold of old man into which he hoped he’d ripen himself.

The opening remarks told him he’d come on a special day for this church: it was the old man’s last sermon. He’d given his first one in this church a full four decades ago, a much younger man with a long future ahead of him. The old man spoke of his imminent departure, and of the passage it marked to his life’s Final Stage, and all the while spoke like a man at peace with life’s impermanence, with the natural cycle of life and death that spins us all. Only the slightest sadness could be sensed; more palpable was the old man’s obvious concern that he’d chosen a suitable topic for his final performance on this sunny morn.

The Sermon

He’d chosen, the old man announced, to speak of a story surely known to all the faithful in the house, a story that had surely gripped them all in childhood, such were its wonders and beauties, such its gifts of wisdom and hope.

And that story, he said, was this: the Tale of the Frog and the Princess.

The groom-to-be scanned the faces of his in-laws-to-be and others in nearby pews for signs of scandal. Surely the congregation would find this choice inappropriate — it wasn’t from the Bible at all, and worse yet, it was a childish fairy tale! But all he saw on the all those faces was soft smiles and eyes aglow with an anticipation both childlike and mature. He smiled too, and with no lip-bleeding grit. While he fully expected the old man to somehow, by the end of the sermon, tie the fairy tale to the predictable narrative he’d heard so often when small, he nonetheless adored the idea of letting the old man lead him, along with the rest, back to those days of childhood.

In this return to the “teachings of childhood” — his favorite line from Gone With the Wind, and his favorite silver moment in all of Clark Gable’s celluloid immortality — what meanings would he hear in this story now, as an adult, that he couldn’t hear as a child? He’d forgotten much of the story. What were the details?

He was ready to listen to the old man with the best of his own “good faith.”

The old man eased into his tale. “You remember the story,” he said. “How the Princess had a golden ball she loved to throw into the air and catch — how it so glowed in the sky she imagined she was catching the very sun.

“And you remember,” he continued, “how her parents told her never to go beyond the palace walls into the forest. It was full of dirt and, worse than dirt, of the lowly people of the realm — the ‘commoners.’

“But we know how the old tales work,” he went on. “Of course the Princess was fated to transgress her parents’ boundaries.

“One day, she threw the ball too high, and over the palace wall it went, with her in hot pursuit. She exited the gate just in time to see her golden ball bounce down the hill, bounce high once, and again, and then plop into a deep, dark well. Of course that well was dirty — too dirty for our Princess. All she could do was kneel there by the well, the silly bird, crying and crying over that stupid golden ball.

“She was at least lucky in one respect,” he added with a pause long enough to look a good half of the congregation in the eye: “There were no dirty poor people around.”

A faint laugh came from the faithful.

“You remember too, I’m sure, that the Princess stopped her blubbering when a frog approached her, all slimy and wet and, in a word, dirty — and she recoiled from it in disgust that soon turned to wonder. Because it spoke to her.

” ‘What are you crying about, Princess?’,” it croaked.

“She answered it the way a Princess should answer a dirty thing: dripping with disdain. ‘I’m crying because my golden ball fell into the well, you dirty frog.’

“But the frog’s next croak caught her attention: ‘What if I can get your ball for you? What will you give me?’

“The Princess’ life was so stuffed with gold, she knew she could give him a small fortune without noticing its absence. ‘I’ll give you my golden crown,’ she said.

“Now it was the frog’s turn for disdain. ‘What would I do with a golden crown? All it would do is drag me to the bottom of the pond and drown me.’

“The King’s little girl was dense enough to follow with an offer of a perfect pearl necklace — she surely had dozens of them, so no worries there,” he added. “But the frog explained they’d just tangle around his legs and, again, cause him to drown. No thanks, said he.

“The Princess huffed and, like our friend Mr. Pooh — Of Very Little Brain — said, ‘What about my ruby ring, then?’ And again the frog croaked out a snort: ‘It would fall off my finger and I’d be left with nothing at all.’

The old man stopped the story to observe that so far, the girl had failed to recognize the frog as a “person” at all. It was just a thing to be bought off, a laborer to do the dirty-work and get her back her gold. It never occurred to her to ask the frog what he needed; never occurred to her to think of the frog as another living “person” at all. He sighed and shook his head, and as he took a breath to continue, the groom thought, “Here comes the pivot to the preaching.”

He was wrong.

“But in the classic ‘Rule of Threes’ pattern so common in stories, it seems our Princess, after hearing the frog three times try to tell her that what she valued for him had no value, finally — though probably dimly, for our dear princess is a dimwit  — finally, I say, she begins to catch on: she’s talking to another living soul. How do I know? Because her next offer is different: ‘I’ll give you one of my silk slippers,’ she says — wait for it, now….ready? — ’so that you may sleep in it and keep warm.’”

Another gaze into the pews, then: “That’s more like it,” he said. “There’s always hope. A warm place to sleep is something we all need. It’s a lot more important than jewels to our cold, clammy frog. Our Princess is waking up.” His eyebrows arched above his bifocals, and he smiled.

The groom smiled back.

“Mr. Frog still wasn’t sold, though, but — if you’ll pardon this old man for saying so — the offer seemed to bring out his kinky side: ‘I don’t want your slipper,’ he says. ‘But it gives me an idea. What I do want,’ Frog continued, ‘is…’ — and pardon me, ladies — ‘to sleep in your bed. With you.’”

[I hate to do this to you, but it's late, so: to be continued. Soon.]

If you happen to be so good at Photoshop or Illustrator that you can knock out a decent website banner in 20 minutes or so — unlike me, for whom a miserably failed attempt takes hours — I’d appreciate your help. I’m ready to launch a new website that I think is important, and want it to look more than Bush League.

I can’t pay you for it — I’m already paying for the website hosting and putting free hours into the concept and content, all for the sake of education, not profit — but I can give you credit and free advertising on this site and the new one.

If you’re interested in helping, fill out the contact form below — and thanks.

[Update: Form closed. Thanks to all who responded!]

An example worth sharing to students of a kid who figured out the power of simple blogging — combined, of course, with quality thinking and writing — and blogged his way to stardom by age 27. In China.

From the excellent China Digital Times, with emphasis added:

Han Han was named as the ‘Person of the Year” in 2009 by two influential publications: Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend（南方周末) and Hong Kong-based magazine Asia Weekly (亚洲周刊). Here are some excerpts of the relevant articles in both publications, translated by CDT:

By Asia Weekly: Han Han: Youthful Citizen vs Power 亚洲周刊二零零九年度风云人物韩寒——青春公民VS权力.

Han Han is a 27-year-old author and race car driver, and his blog has generated nearly 300 million visits since 2006. He follows and is concerned with public rights defending events. On the Shanghai “Fishing” incident, Hangzhou “70 yards” incident, forced eviction incident and other events his clear and powerful writing has generated an enormous influence on public opinion. As a member of the post-80s generation, he lives authentically and freely, and demonstrates the energy of China’s youthful citizens and the hope of civil society in China.

韩寒，二十七岁的作家和赛车手，博客浏览量近三亿，他关注、跟进公共维权事件，在上海「钓鱼」事件、杭州「七十码」、强拆民居事件中，言论清醒、有力，产生巨大舆论影响力；作为「八零后」一代，他活得真实、自由，展示中国青春公民的能量和中国公民社会的希望。

From Southern Weekend: The Name of Han Han Means to Offend [the Establishment]

In the public eyes for ten years, he is now a household name, and still young, he is called by his supporters “Young Master Han.” This nickname is flattering and lighthearted, saying that he has style and quality, and is not a boring person. Young Master Han is an author, the only National Champion of in both field and rally car race, is an idol, and owns a blog which has the highest traffic in the world. He is so famous, that people often forget how extraordinary it is that one person has all these different titles. But Young Master Han became the Han Han that is now widely respected after he started a blog, and began writing social commentary which resonates with our time. His self-styled commentaries caused controversy, but were also widely popular. One day, even the most conservative people started to realize that this young man was not full of nonsense. Behind the 300 million clicks on his blog posts was a fresh humanist radiating the wave of freedom. [read the rest]

Regular readers will know I’ve become somewhat of an elitist when it comes to urging the young to blog, only wanting to “attract” those rare students who have the gifts but don’t seem to understand the tools we now have to manifest those gifts to the world — and this example is a case in point: Han can write well and think critically, “follows” (surely via RSS?) issues he “is concerned with” and writes about them. In other words, he’s got the gifts of curiosity, passion, a drive for socio-political engagement and reform, and an apparently wicked mind and pen. And a “humanist” to boot.¹

The most delicious detail in this young man’s delicious life? His secondary school held him back a year, and he dropped out of school without graduating.

Han Han was born on September 23, 1982. He won the first class award in the first “New Concept” writing contest in 1999, and was held back in his first year in the Songjian Number 2 High School in Shanghai the same year. He dropped out of high school in 2000, and published his first novel “Three Gates.” This book has sold 2,030,000 copies since then.

{…}

In 2008, he published a selected collection of his blog posts, “Random Texts.” In 2009, he published a novel, “His Nation,” a collection of essays, “Grass,” and a collection of blog posts, “Lovely Predators”…. Also in 2009, he announced he would publish a magazine “A Chorus of Solos.” [Han Han originally planned to name the magazine Renaissance, but the name was not approved by authorities.]

P.S.–To any students at my school: if you think you have this kind of talent, and want me to help you learn the simple blogging tools, come see me. I’ll work overtime with you, and it will have nothing to do with grades, homework, or GPA’s.

1. I’m teaching the Enlightenment right now in European history, alongside my Chinese history course, and Han for all the world sounds like a Chinese Voltaire to me. And good god, just think if Voltaire could have blogged. [↩]

Second draft:

On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet.¹

So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet?

I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

1. I know, I know — wannabee Nietszchean aphorist indulgence. But cut me some slack. Time is slow here on this beach. [↩]

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind.

John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about it to the guy who knew you way back when when you so naively embarked on a conscious search for “Truth” — especially when that same guy joined you, and with exactly the same naivete — that is something new.

It’s like our 20-year old selves were sitting on that beach with us two 47-year-olds all day.

False Starts in the Search for Truth

That 20-year-old me was such a lousy seeker for Truth. He read all the Old Books devotedly — the Greek, the Hebrew, the Vedic, the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Gnostic, the Transcendental, “Yak yak yak.” He read them all, underlined passages, filled margins with scribbles, exclamation points, interrobangs. He started (and rarely finished) journals devoted to only copying the choicest of those words of Wisdom — quotes only. The Things to Remember. These were the words of Wisdom and Truth, and they were going to teach him Truth and Wisdom, by god. If he read them real closely to be sure he understood, then he’d find Truth and Wisdom. And life would be better because he’d have those things.

All I could do today while thinking about him was laugh at him.

Because I think I know now that that’s exactly the wrong way to read the Old Books.

If I had read Gilgamesh back then, when I was him, I would have been expecting it to teach me too. Another Old Book that was supposed to be Wise. That’s not how I read it now, thank goodness.

How Moderns Read

Anyway, I sat there on that beach wishing I had my iPod so I could record  what I was trying to aphoristically sum up about what I know about reading now — and wish I’d known well before 20, at your age, my students. I didn’t want this little stab at something essential to slip away. It went something like this:

It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.¹

That mental shift in relation to reading, I want to say, comes close to a definition of the modern reader. A traditional reader gives up his authority to the author. A modern reader takes that authority back. Copernicus did it to Aristotle and Ptolemy, for example — he doubted their scientific authority based on his own observations. Voltaire and Nietzsche did it to the religious authority of popes, preachers, and the Bible.

A modern reader, in a nutshell, doesn’t read on his knees.

The scary thing? It seems that a large number of Americans are not modern readers at all.

And the sad thing? They all went to American schools — which doesn’t speak well about American education.

1. And yes, this is probably true of all books. But moreso, I think, for pre-scientific books. [↩]

This is a picture of the Pattaya Beach I wasn't at that I didn't take. Who needs a camera when you know there's a picture on Flickr?

So I’m somewhere in Thailand called Pattaya that I wouldn’t choose to come to except that John, my best friend from my “professional college student/Bohemian vagabond years” from age 20 to 34, is here — I wrote about him and those years of our knuckleheaded intellectual awakening in the In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males post last year — and it’s the first time we’ve seen each other in 15 years, which is really cool. It was only a two-hour flight from Singapore to make this quick reunion. I’m pleasantly surprised we both made it this close to 50. And ditto that the conversations are as comfortable as if we just had coffee yesterday in 1994.

Anyway, this post isn’t about John. It’s about thoughts I had with him as we lounged on an empty stretch of beach away from the tourist-infested area.¹

John went the Ph.D. route and is now a philosophy and religious studies professor in the States. He’s a big Buddhism head, but he also teaches logic and critical thinking.

I watched a nice white cloud float across a nice azure sky, right up there above the palm fronds shot through with sunlight, and asked John with my own big teacher head, “So how do you teach critical thinking, anyway?”

The part of his answer that interested me most was: “The hardest part for me, and the most important part, is getting students to see in what they’re reading what the real issue is. Texts and writers often don’t make that clear.”

I said “hm” and watched more clouds, listened to the same surf’s voice here in Thailand that John and I heard under so many conversations in Los Angeles in the ’80s and Oregon in the ’90s. And I listened to some thoughts that I wish an interior monologue recorder would have recorded so I could play them to my history students (doesn’t it suck that our students get to hear so few of our many — for me practically constant – random thoughts about what we want them to learn, see, understand? That they can’t join us in interior dialogues?).

So I’m going to try to pull those thoughts back up. They’re pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to teach. It goes something like this:

You’re Learning Everything About European History Except What’s Important

I’ve tried to give you what we’ve called “the Big Picture” of how our species left Africa, populated Europe and Mesopotamia, started farming, made civilizations, spread those civilizations, got more complex, created institutions of politics and religions and economics and social organization and, as the Thais say, “Yak yak yak.” We’ve toured this pretty coherently, I think, in the first semester, all the way up to the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. I’ve tried to give you that coherent “Big Picture” framework because I never got it when I was in high school, and it took me way too long — into my 30s — to have it. That meant whenever I read or heard about a book or event or person from the past during the first decade-plus of my adulthood, I couldn’t “place it on the map,” give it a mental context — “Oh, that’s when the Reformation and the Age of Exploration and the Renaissance were going on all at once, so everybody was so confused with all the new knowledge when that happened” sort of thing.

Everything that happened before my life began, in other words, was something like an “historical orphan.” It had no relations with the other things going on around it when it was alive.

So I’ve tried really hard for the first half of our year together to make that story coherent, to make you see that A couldn’t have happened before B because B partly caused A, on and on. (I wrote about that a while back in Why History Isn’t Learned, and How Story Helps Change That.) I’ve tried really hard to give you that framework so you’re not the idiot I was for so many of my first college years.

And congratulations: Most of you, judging from your semester exam essays, seem to have got that hiStory in your heads.

But here’s the problem that I saw when reading those essays:

You Think “Western Civ” is About Learning “Western Civ.” It’s Not.

As John put it, you’ve read the text and understood it, but you don’t understand the issue.

And the issue, to put it in a nutshell, is this: Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all you’ve done is learn it. You seem to think that we’re teaching you Western Civilization because gee, it’s a great civilization.

It’s not. Like all civilizations, it has its strengths and it has its flaws. Just because it’s part of the dominant culture today doesn’t make it good. Maybe the dominant culture today would be much better if certain aspects of Western Civilization were different — or even non-existent.

Most of your essays saddened me because they were so full of cheer-leading for the West. Civilizations, Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern, don’t need cheerleaders. They need critics.

So in the second semester, let’s up the game. You’re going to continue learning that Big Picture. But I hope you’re also going to start forming your opinions about it, embracing parts of it, rejecting others, arguing some parts are broken and need fixing, and proposing how, if you were in the position of power to fix it, you would go about doing that.

Because many of you, when I’m losing my last teeth and blogging through bifocals decades from now, may very well be in those positions of power. And I hope you’re exercising that power not with pom-poms, but with sharp-eyed solutions to the problems you’ll inherit.

Otherwise this future old man is screwed.

Jeez, That was Heavy

So I’m going to go get a massage now. That’s one of the beautiful things about Thai civilization. They understand that a trip to the massage parlor is just as important as a trip to the shopping mall. The West could learn from that.

Image by piwaen

1. Thailand travel tip: rent a scooter your first day, then take it 30 minutes minimum from where all the tourists are to find an out of the way place where you can have some peace, quiet, and authenticity. [↩]

I just discovered the 2008 Webby Award-winning “You Suck at Photoshop” series on YouTube. While it may not succeed at making me a Photoshop ninja, it does succeed at convincing me that this kind of project would make the classroom an awesome place.

Here’s why: the series demonstrates a mastery of content knowledge — in this case, Photoshop technique — while at the same time adding a creative element that makes the content-master stand out from the equally masterful but unimaginative competition. Point blank: in the hands of this guy, something as dull as “how to use layers” becomes a vehicle that screams, “Hire me to write for ‘30 Rock‘!” He proves he can turn lead into gold, which is a real-world skill not many people have. Alchemists like that deserve the chance to display their creative magic in school.

The Mental Work is Hard….

“You Suck at Photoshop” displays that creative magic in the form of fiction (see the Wikipedia entry on the series for  more). The host of the tutorials is a persona named “Donnie,” a loser stuck in a lousy life with a lousy wife. We learn about Donnie’s life through a series of such sometimes-subtle details as his choice of photos for the tutorial — “Say you want to use a photo of the Vanagon your wife meets her high school boyfriend in on Friday nights….wait, I’ve got one right here” (scroll past other photos of — gulp — handguns, and one of the high school boyfriend labeled — gulp — “douche-b.png”) — and such sometimes-over-the-top details as the wife barging in to kvetch at him in the middle of his tutorial, or his loser friend Skyping in with a loser-emergency while Donnie is making his screencast.

The creator of this project not only demonstrates his literary creativity by creating the fictional “Donnie” persona and populating his Photoshop folders with props like the pictures mentioned above; he takes it further with his dramatic creativity as he acts out the role of that persona with his voice-over. The vocal acting covers a broad emotional terrain, from dude in his basement chillaxing with his laptop to powder-keg psychopath struggling to keep the flame from his fuse. The acting is just awesome.

….The Tech is Dead Easy

The beauty of the project technology-wise is that it requires nothing more than a screencasting program like the free Jing or Screencast-o-matic, plus a webcam and microphone — your standard kit in most computers today. So the technical hurdles for students to do such a project are basically nil.

That leaves the whole of their energies to devote to the other two aspects of the project: mastery and critical understanding of the content, and creative concept development to deliver that understanding.

Too Beautiful for School?

So I’m wrestling, as usual, with the ways this wonderfully simple approach to creative learning will be complicated by the forces of schooliness:

• Do I have to make a rubric for it, and if so, does that kill the creativity with its prescriptive check-box drudgery, or limit the infinite creative possibilities by dictating “it must be this and not that, and that and not this”?
• Is it sustainable in terms of watching and grading and giving feedback to 100 students doing such an assignment?
• How do I define satisfactory content mastery and creativity for this assignment?
• How do I encourage experimentation and the healthy embrace of possible failure when I have to slap a low grade on it if it does indeed “fail”?
• Should I make it optional, in following with my increasingly elitist impulse to definitely not “push” the unwilling to attempt genius, and not even “pull” them, but only to “attract” the three percent of “roses” in any student population who might blossom in the attempt?

I don’t know.

Nor do I know how to adapt this for a history classroom. Can “You Suck at Photoshop” become “You Suck at History”? How? How can this be used for Europe from the French Revolution to the present, or the complete history of China?

My recent brainstorm on giving a conceptual purpose to learning Chinese history by “interpreting it for historically-ignorant Westerners” seems to have some openings. God knows, there are ample websites of Chinese and Western art, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and more that students could tab through on their screencasts as they provide their commentary like “Donnie” does to his open Photoshop on his desktop. But the maker of “Donnie” has the luxury of revealing that persona through the image “props” in his folders, while history students wouldn’t have as easy a task of  revealing persona if they were forced instead to work with history websites in their screencasts.

One solution I’m considering is making it a summative, end-of-semester project, in which students have most of the semester to let their creative juices stew and come up with their own ideas over the first few months. Then give a couple of weeks of class time to a workshop in which they design and execute those ideas.

Otherwise, I’m mostly adrift. Maybe you can help.

But if you watch the three-minute first episode below, you should see why I’m bewitched by the idea:

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole playlist. Then help me figure out how I can make this work?

I wrote recently about how many of my otherwise sharp students were “Google fundamentalists” who argued, to simplify a bit, that “if it’s in Google, it’s valid.” These are often the same students who insist they should be able to use Wikipedia as a source for research.

I’ve been skimming Wikipedia’s own policies for writing and research, and Lo! The Great Wikipedia itself tells its writers the very things I was trying to tell my young fundies. Maybe hearing from the Great Wiki God’s own mouth that Wikipedia and blogs should not be taken on faith, and are not considered reliable sources, will bring them out of Digital Barbarism and into the Enlightenment.

So below, brothers and sisters in Reason, are chapter and verse from the Wikipedia Scriptures themselves, warning the faithful not to rely on Wikipedia, blogs, other wikis, forums, self-published books, or textbooks for research. Nice caveats apply in some cases to spur further discussion.

I share for those who share my pain [emphases added]:

• Wikipedia:Reliable source examples – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• • –full Wikipedia page

  • Are wikis reliable sources?

  • Wikis, including Wikipedia and other wikis sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, are not regarded as reliable sources. However, wikis are excellent places to locate primary and secondary sources.

  • Are weblogs reliable sources? (more below the fold…) Read the rest of this entry »